What to say about ...

So where were you yesterday? Explain that you were feeling "the Force" in London - watching all six Star Wars films, including the latest and last (which is actually the third). That's not really true: you spent the day reading papers, including the Observer, which told you about the special screening that started at 7am yesterday in Leicester Square and culminated in the UK premiere of Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith.

Adopting the antagonistic tones of Cosmo Landesman in the Sunday Times, you wonder "does anyone but the army of Star Wars anoraks find George Lucas's Edward Gibbon-like account of the rise and fall of the Republic interesting?" Yet with the latest cut and thrust of lightsabres, nostalgia for the first Star Wars in 1977 wells up. "That film was everything: our imagination, our toys, our very belief system," you say, quoting Hugo Rifkind in the Glasgow Herald.

Echoing Simon Pegg in the Sunday Telegraph, you were deeply disappointed by the first two prequels - The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones - "so Revenge of the Sith arrives with a galaxy's weight of expectation on its black-clad shoulders".

But what's the point of getting so excited when you know how it turns out, your friends ask. You refer them to the words of Hayden Christensen, who plays Anakin Skywalker, in the Mail on Sunday: "It's like Titanic. You know the end before it starts, but it's how you get there that makes it so compelling."

Having seen his performance, you wonder if the actor knows the meaning of the word compelling, and admit, along with David Ansen in Newsweek, that the new film suffers from "the usual Lucas liabilities: graceless dialogue, wooden acting, overcluttered compositions and undercooked characters". Like Chris Tookey in the Daily Mail, you still prefer the earlier - or should that be later? - movies, "in which Harrison Ford lends a welcome edge of cynicism and sex appeal".

And then there's the merchandise, you say, salivating over the Lego Star Wars videogame you read about in the Sun. You weren't surprised to see in the Observer that the revenue from ticket and merchandise sales now totals £10.8bn, more than any other film franchise, making the Star Wars empire "richer than the large majority of African countries".

And it's not over yet: you learned from Total Film there is a "tantalising possibility" of a Kevin Smith-scripted TV pilot starring Mark Hamill, who played Luke Skywalker in the first three Star Wars. Some people may be with the Times's Kevin Maher on this one, you say: with the release of Revenge of the Sith, the world "can eventually, finally, grow up". Lucky, you'd be.